With the sexual abuse of children so much in the news Susan Lee speaks to an author about her experience and why she has chosen to speak out.

AT the age of 72 Linda Girling can still hear the creak of the bedroom door.

It was the noise which, as a little girl lying in bed, signalled the arrival into her room of her step-father. The noise which signalled the start of his abuse.

Now a successful author living in Crosby her experiences have fuelled her life and informed her writing.

And with sexual abuse of children at the top of the news agenda she feels strongly that speaking of her own abuse will help others.

“People often ask why I write, and I usually give the glib reply that I’m fit for now’t else,” says the mother of two and grandmother of one who writes under the name of Ruth Hamilton.

“But at the age of almost 73, I've stopped lying to myself and to others.

“Much has been said of late about famous paedophiles. My abuser was not famous; he was the local window cleaner and my step- father.”

Born in Bolton, her father was killed in WWII and her mother remarried. The abuse began, she says, when she was about seven and, with her mother out at work, her step-father would bathe her.

Later he would creep into bed beside her to commit the abuse.

“At the beginning I thought it was normal. Did I initially say anything? No. I was terrified I’d be taken away from my mother and put into care.

“Had I screamed, he would have killed me and, possibly, my mother and his own daughters. How did I know that? No idea.”

Her escape was the local library.

“Books, books and more books. I absorbed millions of words. Now as an author I reproduce them all just in a different order.”

But by the time she reached the age of 14 she was, she says, ‘tall, strong and furious’ – and willing to fight back.

“He was thinner and more frail.

“I kicked him down a flight of uncarpeted stairs and he landed on a hard, asphalt floor, also uncarpeted. His head bounced. Scared, I sat on the stairs and wet myself. So it was a quick change and across to the library wall. I strode over his ‘corpse’ and chatted animatedly with other wall-sitters.

“Alibi.”

Her mother returned home from the cotton mill.

“When mam and I entered the house, the 'corpse' had moved and was seated in the back room. He said he'd fallen off his ladder. She bathed his head while I sat opposite him, glaring into those deep-set, evil eyes. That was my silent declaration of war.”

Next, she confided in a policeman known to the family.

“I remember him coming to the door in his shirt sleeves to hear what I had to say, went back inside and then returned with his shirt sleeves rolled down.

“My stepfather ran upstairs and dragged furniture against the front bedroom door. I repeated my statement in the presence of my mother and the constable. She forced me to deny it, though evidence of his guilt scraping heavily across the upper floor was clearly audible.

“Mam let me down only once, but it was big-style.

“From that day, he never left the house by the front door, as he didn’t want the policeman to see him.

“My mother stopped going to work, and I was never again left alone with him. But if she went upstairs, I whispered at him about the written statement kept in my desk at school. ‘Come near me again and I'll give it in. Kill me, and my friend will take it to the police station.' Lies, of course.”

Where did her fear go?

“It died under the weight of my fury, my sense of self and my God-given right to bodily integrity.”

Her stepfather died in 1958 at the age of 43 due to a violent reaction to all broad-spectrum antibiotics. When he was buried, Linda was in Paris studying at the Sorbonne having previously won a place at grammar school.

For many years a teacher, she embarked on a literary career in the 1980s. In her first novel, A Whisper to the Living, she retold her childhood experiences through the main character Annie.

She has subsequently written many more novels, a number of which have been set in Liverpool.

“To become a writer I had to pick the sore off the scab and let it bleed.”

With child abuse so much in the news she has a strong message for teachers, medics and social workers.

“Don’t look just at the dirty, ill-clad and underfed child, the one who hides in corners. I was bright, cheerful, healthy, always pushing myself to the front. Away from my abuser, I was the life and soul, because the revolutionary in me survived a man I always knew to be my inferior.

“He was stupid enough to think he would get away with it, that I would never mature. He was a brainless twit; I was going places.”

She is convinced abusers are ‘incurable’ and says the current focus on sex abuse and the ongoing inquiries leave her ‘angry on one level, glad on another’.

“Marrying those two extremes of sentiment isn’t easy, though the combination fuels my writing. I'm furious for the afflicted and glad that paedos are being rounded up. I only wish I could join the posse.”

What she can do, though, is speak out.

“It is important that people speak out. It doesn’t matter if you are 70 or 80 or 90. It has to be heard.

“Children matter. They are all we have; they are the future. Yes, that sounds trite, but it's the most important fact. To help them, if you have suffered, speak out. Don’t be afraid.”

Ruth Hamilton is published by Pan Macmillan. www.ruth-hamilton.co.uk. Her lbooks include: Bells of Scotland Road, Mersey View, That Liverpool Girl and Lights of Liverpool.